‘The Walking Dead’: Zombies as stress test

Sunday

Oct 24, 2010 at 8:00 AM

By DAVE ITZKOFFNew York Times News Service

There is a certain comforting familiarity to how a zombie-invasion movie is supposed to unfold. Civilization revels in unsuspectingly tenuous tranquillity; a virus or alien pathogen is unleashed; the dead rise from their graves; two hours of vivid acts of cannibalism and exposed human innards ensue.But what happens next? For some fans of the genre, not enough.“The ending of every zombie movie is usually: Hey, we ran out of time, let’s end this now,” said Robert Kirkman, the writer and a creator of the comic-book series “The Walking Dead.” “Most of the characters die, or all of the characters die, or the characters that live ride off into the sunset. It always occurred to me that there was a lot more story to tell.” Since 2003 Kirkman, a 31-year-old resident of Lexington, Ky., has been adding chapters to his illustrated tale about a group of human survivors in an American South ravaged by flesh-eating undead hordes. A modern-day entry in a field that has shuffled forward at a slow but relentless pace since the 1968 release of George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” “The Walking Dead” will soon have its 78th issue released by Image Comics.But the truest test of whether a wide audience shares Kirkman’s appetite for ghoul-evading, blood-spattering terror will come, appropriately enough, on Halloween, when “The Walking Dead” makes its debut as an original series on AMC. As you would expect from AMC, the cable-television home of “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad” and “Rubicon,” “The Walking Dead” comes with a pedigree: Its producers include Gale Anne Hurd, whose films include the “Terminator” movies and “Aliens,” and Frank Darabont, the director and screenwriter of “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile.” Darabont, who is also a writer on “The Walking Dead” and directed its pilot episode, has not lost touch with his formative days writing the screenplays for horror films like “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” and “The Fly II.” He discovered Kirkman’s material about five years ago on a routine visit to a Burbank, Calif., comic-book shop.Darabont said the comics presented a ready-made narrative about people trying to survive extreme situations in which zombies were a facet but not the focus.“It really is the human story that’s being told,” Darabont said. “I always say that’s the meal. What are the great stories you can tell about these people? The zombies are really the context to tell that story. They’re the frosting on the cake.” At that time Darabont was signed to an overall deal at NBC. And while he realized a show populated with decomposing antagonists might not be the easiest fit for prime-time television, he took inspiration from other network series whose fantastic premises were simply a jumping-off point for character-driven drama.“I’m not trying to borrow anybody else’s glory or mojo,” Darabont said. “But fundamentally what’s really interesting about a bunch of people trapped on a weird island? It’s not so much the weird island, is it? It’s that you get to really care about these people, and you go on their journey with them.” But a “Walking Dead” pilot script did not get far at NBC. “On the face of it they got excited,” Darabont said. “‘Oh my God, a zombie show!’ Then I wrote the script and handed it to them. And they said, ‘Oh my God, this is a zombie show.” ’The project didn’t stay buried for good, however. Hurd joined “The Walking Dead” as a producer, and the series was pitched last fall to AMC, which committed to shooting six episodes last summer.In some ways the television version of “The Walking Dead” hews closely to the story established in the comic books. Its central character is Rick Grimes (played by Andrew Lincoln), a Kentucky police officer who is hospitalized in a coma after being wounded in the line of duty. He revives weeks later to a world that has been devastated by zombies, leaving him to seek out whether his family — and humanity — has survived.The series also finds ways to weave in subplots that were not in Kirkman’s original tales, expanding on the back stories of supporting characters, lingering on scenes that in the comics are told in just a few panels.But perhaps the most surprising twist to “The Walking Dead” is that it is being shown on AMC, a channel whose brand of original series is associated with prestige, critical approval and Emmy Awards — qualities not typically associated with zombie-theme programming.Charlie Collier, the president and general manager of the network, said that it had a long history of using its library of genre movies to help spin off original programming: a month of Western movies preceded the debut of the network’s 2006 original movie “Broken Trail,” and a lineup of anti-hero films like “Goodfellas” helped buttress the earliest episodes of “Mad Men.” Similarly, AMC’s annual horror-movie marathon, “Fearfest,” will lead into the premiere of “The Walking Dead.” Joel Stillerman, the senior vice president for original programming at AMC, said that an end-of-the-world scenario and a high level of quality were not mutually exclusive, comparing “The Walking Dead” to films like “The Road,” which was adapted from the grim Cormac McCarthy novel. In these narratives, Stillerman said, viewers are responding to how characters deal with their conditions, while what led to these conditions “almost doesn’t matter on some level.” “In this case,” he added, “it happens to be the zombie apocalypse.” AMC may yet have to do some convincing to win over viewers who are not dedicated horror-movie fans. Lincoln, a British actor who is best known in the United States for the romantic comedy “Love, Actually,” said he was surprised when he learned of the subject matter.“I went, ‘Zombie?’” Lincoln said. “My eyebrow raised. But my agent said: ‘No, no, no. Listen. Trust me.” ’Once he started reading deeper into the scripts, Lincoln said, the material defied his expectations.“The sides that I read, they had no mention of zombies,” he said, adding, “I certainly didn’t think that it would be as funny or as moving, particularly.” Committing to the series led to a shoot during an exceptionally hot and humid summer in Atlanta (or “Satan’s Jacuzzi,” as Darabont described it). Though Lincoln did not have to don layers of zombie makeup (designed for the series by the special effects artist Gregory Nicotero), he suffered for his art. He lost 12 pounds to play his resuscitated character, then found he couldn’t regain the weight in the blistering heat.“Everyone started looking at me and going, ‘Eat, Andy,’” Lincoln recalled. “If it was Method acting. It wasn’t out of choice. It was 100 degrees every day.” The end result is a series that aspires to convey the same level of human desperation as AMC’s other signature shows, but with more decaying flesh, exploding body parts and devoured horses. Ratings, of course, will determine whether AMC will give “The Walking Dead” a long future. But there is already sense between Darabont and Kirkman that they have developed a shorthand to guide them through future episodes.Darabont said he takes his lead from Kirkman and his comics. “I’m like the dog going on the walk,” he said. “I’ll be getting distracted and going off into the bushes here and there, and hunting out a few squirrels.” And Kirkman, who has already mapped out 150 issues of what he hopes will be a 300-issue “Walking Dead” series, said he trusts Darabont to be faithful to the spirit of that narrative.“If I had been on the phone with him, and Frank had said something along the lines of, ‘I feel like it’s just missing one thing, and that one thing is dinosaurs,’ I would have known to run for the hills,” Kirkman said. “Thankfully, Frank didn’t say that.”